ENOUGH SAID: THE MOVIES OF 2013

By this point, I think it’s fair to suggest that there has indeed been more than enough said about 2013, the year in movies. This weekend the Academy Awards will twist down the final cultural cap hard and firm on the bottleneck of need-to-know info about just exactly what was good regarding the past 12 months in theaters (and on Blu-ray and streaming and VOD)—no matter that their choices are not likely to resonate down through the halls of our collective consciousness for much longer than it takes to say “And the Oscar goes to…” (Quick: When was the last time, outside of TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar, that you watched, or even gave a thought to the Best Picture winner from 1968?) 

And if you’ve been paying attention at all since mid-December (maybe even if you’ve made a concerted effort to shield yourself from the barrage), you’ve heard plenty from seasoned and intelligent writers, august critical organizations, professional cranks and unpaid crackpots about why American Hustle and 12 Years a Slave and Her and Captain Phillips and Nebraska are great, award-worthy films, enough, perhaps, to gag even the hungriest, gorge-prone film fan, even if their appetites never seem to wane. So is there really much left to be said?

Well, yes, I suppose so, if our level of interest in movies, and going to the movies, has any life apart from the official AMPAS-sanctioned list of honorees. In any good cinematic year, there’s probably more interesting, challenging perspective to be had on every aspect of what’s available than there are individual movies, if you’re willing to dig for it. And in this digital age, when the proliferation of that perspective has rapidly morphed from the status of charting a new frontier to looking for a few needles of wisdom amongst a field of haystacks, zeroing in on voices worth listening to requires a measure of patience.

In despairing over the prevalence of “writers” like Jeffrey Wells and the seeming thousands of keyboard-bangers masking as film journalists, breathlessly reporting about projected box-office grosses, actual box-office grosses, casting rumors and snarky industry gossip, it’s easy to also despair about the dearth of real film criticism, or more specifically, the dearth of paying jobs for real film critics. But there are still a few out there-- David Edelstein, Stephanie Zacharek, David Denby, Andrew O’Hehir, Michael Sragow, Richard Brody, Tom Carson, all refugees from or currently clinging denizens of the age of print, all with an online presence, flanked by up-and-comers and established writers like Bilge Ebiri, Amy Nicholson, Alan Scherstuhl, Ed Gonzalez, Nick Schager, Sean Burns, Robert Abele, Keith Uhlich and Sean Axmaker, all of whom do excellent work for various online and print publications.

Then there’s RogerEbert.com which has, in the wake of Ebert’s death and under the guidance of Matt Zoller Seitz (himself no slouch as a film critic, as you may know), become a wonderful aggregate site for all sorts of fascinating angles on the world of movies. One link brings you closer to the wisdom and humor of sensitive and provocative writers like Odie Henderson, Simon Abrams, Glenn Kenny, Sheila O’Malley, Ali Arikan, Steven Boone, Edward Copeland, Brian Doan, Craig D. Lindsey and a host of others.

And I can also count myself lucky enough to have plenty of Facebook contact with writers and connoisseurs of film like Richard Harland Smith, Jim Emerson, Charles Taylor, Matthew David Wilder, Carrie Rickey, Tom Block, David Ehrenstein, Chuck Bowen Jr., Farran Smith Nehme, Ariel Schudson and Bill Ryan, all of whom keep the conversation lively and keep my brain from getting too lazy. With friends and resources like all those noted above, it’s on me and you if we can’t keep up.

Speaking of which, last year I noted that for me the experience of seeing films in theaters was becoming a much more rare occurrence, if not, unfortunately, a more rarified one. And this year, courtesy of lack of time and the increased expense, going out to a theater officially became a luxury. In 2013 my family and I have become denizens of the dollar houses, seeking out second-run showings and bargain matinees whenever possible, to keep some sort of contact with the theatrical experience. 

But much more often than ever before, video-on-demand has become a crucial avenue in keeping up not only with the big-budget items I had to pass on theatrically, but also with the avalanche of under-the-radar, niche films that pass in and out of theaters far too quickly for my tortoise-like ability to find opportunities to see them-- of the top 20 films at the head of my list this year, I saw 10 of them in the comfort and distraction of my home, and an 11^th on the big screen that was, for the rest of America, available only on Blu-ray or streaming.

In years past I might have more readily bemoaned this seemingly inevitable passing of the torch from stadium seating to my worn-out living room couch and chairs. And as far as what it means for the exhibition of smaller, less apocalyptically-oriented movies that don’t qualify as IMAX-3D-style events, the mourning continues. It’s hard to argue with the technical spotlessness and clarity provided by a DCP presentation of a first-run movie; even the most hardened elements of the resistance to digital conversion have likely acquiesced at least somewhat. (And I say that as an ardent supporter of any movement to ensure that 35mm doesn’t simply just disappear as a consequence.) But over the past year, thanks to the proliferation of cell phones and the general degradation of simple consideration for others occupying a public space for a particular reason, the act of placing oneself in what feels more and more like a hostile environment—toward the audience and to the movie itself-- is one than I am less and less inclined to participate in.

And it kills me to even say that. In a survey of my high school classmates taken during my senior year, one question put to every graduating student was, “Where will we be able to find you in the future?” I remember part of my answer: Any movie theater where the lights have gone down and a movie is being shown. But a 16-year-old movie fan in 1977 can hopefully be forgiven for not foreseeing what 40 years of technological advances and convenience-based technological entitlement have done to leech out much of the joy of the communal experience of watching movies.

Lest anyone get the idea that first-run multiplexes are the only places where stadium-sized stewpots of offensive audiences can be encountered, run-ins with the gross and annoying are not exactly uncommon during my occasional visit to the art house nearest me, and the lummoxes aren’t necessarily young either—it turns out there’s hardly a statute of limitations on stupidity and thoughtless behavior. A recent encounter at the Pasadena Playhouse 7, an art house dedicated to foreign, independent and middlebrow domestic releases, made me briefly consider giving up the multiplex altogether. 

In addition to the serial coughers, wheezers, hackers, cane-bangers and, yes, phone addicts seated on all sides of me at a screening of The Great Beauty (no blaming the whippersnappers this time-- these folks were all at least my age or older), the “best” and “brightest” ended up seated right next to me. This woman arrived midway through the last preview, and during the start of the actual movie she began unpacking her purse, rummaging through the loudest crunching and crinkling bundles of papers in search of... something, Christ knows what. After about three minutes of this completely distracting rattling, she decided that she needed some help... which she provided with the Klieg-level flashlight app on her phone. As she shone the beam into her purse, continuing the loud rattling, I turned to her and said, "Are you kidding?!" She looked at me and shrugged as if to say, "What can I do?" Meanwhile, the movie rolled on. 

Finally she found what it was she wanted, but this by no means signaled the end of the annoyance. She pulled out what looked to be a quart-sized container, unwrapped a pair of wooden chopsticks, cracked 'em apart and popped the lid, which unleashed a strong, somewhat foul garlic-enhanced odor. She then started shoveling great heaps of dumplings and crunchy vegetables into her gob, chewing loudly, mouth wide open, occasionally coughing when too much food went down too fast. The only respite from all this was when she occasionally gave her jaw a break, at which point she sat and poked compulsively at the contents of the container with her chopsticks, which of course made a thumping noise easily audible over the relative quiet of the movie's soundtrack.

During all this I kept glaring at her, our eyes meeting more than once, but she never offered an apology and certainly never stopped eating. I would have vacated long before, had there been a seat in the auditorium other than in the front row to which I could have moved. At about 20 minutes in, this monster finished her meal and sat quietly for the rest of the movie. Fortunately, the steam rising off the top of my head and blowing out my ears took not quite as long to dissipate.

And last night my wife had almost the very same experience, in the same theater-- a five-course muncher, and an open-mouthed popcorn chewer to boot, accompanied her in the next seat over for a screening of 12 Years a Slave. The deterioration of decorum at the movies, it seems, may be a bigger threat to the notion of going out to the movies than the lack of variety and quality in the movies themselves.

That’s the worst. But I’m here to talk about the best, and before I wear out my welcome, it’s time to note that 2013 was, if not a banner year for movies, then at least a year in which if you were complaining about a dearth of good, intelligent pictures to see it probably meant you weren’t paying close enough attention.

Positioned far away from my best of the year are a number of good “audience” movies like White House Down, The Great Gatsby, Dallas Buyers Club, The To-Do List, Iron Man 3, After Earth, 42, 47 Ronin, Fast & Furious 6, The Wolverine, Despicable Me 2, Bullet to the Head, Frozen, Dark Skies, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Parker, World War Z and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And for those who would never lower themselves to see Vin Diesel or Channing Tatum tromping through high-octane action scenarios in greasy T-shirts, there were still a lot of good choices, including Don Jon, Captain Phillips, Antiviral, Pig, Trance, Stories We Tell, The Lords of Salem, Wrong, Closed Circuit, John Dies at the End, Much Ado About Nothing, After Tiller, 12 Years a Slave, Side Effects, Mud, Ginger and Rosa and The East.     

And try as I might, with all the resources of Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Streaming and, yes, even Redbox at my fingertips, being a film completist for the year has now been consigned to the ever-growing list of impossible tasks that I still try to live up to. I don’t get much in the way of screeners, so I try to take advantage of the options that I have, and living in Los Angeles I know that I have more than many do. Even so, there were so many movies that I missed this year, through no fault other than my own (well, maybe the fleeting exhibition schedules of some of these titles had a little something to do with it). 

This year the list of movie misses includes (but is by no means limited to) The Armstrong Lie, At Berkeley, At Any Price, The Best Man Holiday, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Byzantium, Cutie and the Boxer, The Counselor, Dirty Wars, Drinking Buddies, Europa Report, The Family, The Grandmaster (I still may be able to squeeze Wong Kar-Wai’s movie in tonight before the Oscar show), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (which bows at my favorite dollar house this week), The Hunt, I’m So Excited, The Invisible Woman, Oldboy, Omar, 100 Bloody Acres, The Past, Philomena, The Place Beyond the Pines, Post Tenebras Lux, Rush, Saving Mr. Banks, Short Term 12, The Square, Stoker, This is Martin Bonner, To The Wonder, A Touch of Sin, We Are What We Are, What Maisie Knew and Alain Resnais’ promise that You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.

Onward, however. I’m writing all this up on the morning before the Academy Award ceremonies, a rare and relaxing Saturday morning accompanied by Los Angeles rain, and despite the preceding logorrhea I do need to wrap this up and move on before Oscar renders the whole affair irrelevant, as it is so accomplished at doing with a year’s work. So what I have to say will be uncharacteristically brief (Someone somewhere is cheering, I’m sure) but no less impassioned. These are the works that moved and cheered and thrilled me during one of the most difficult years of my no-longer-so-young life, with accompanying nods to the best of the rest, and some moldy leftovers too (my pick for the worst movie of 2013 was particularly painful), all in the hope that 2014 will be a kinder, more generous and productive year for everyone, including the movies. And in each case, clicking on the title will lead you to a fuller piece of writing on the movie in question, whether that writing comes from my own archives or (more likely) from somewhere else.

10) BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (Peter Strickland)

A recessive British sound engineer (the marvelous Toby Jones) goes to work in a low-rent Italian movie studio on a violent giallo and discovers himself increasingly defenseless against the tension between his past and the horror movie in which he finds himself submerged. Writer-director Strickland seals the engineer (and us) inside the studio, surrounded by sounds we cannot reconcile with sights that are denied us-- the clever faux opening title sequence for the giallo is the only footage we ever actually see-- and the free-floating dread and disorientation Jones begins to experience eventually becomes our own. Here the scream is the goal, the release, and the reverberating sound that refuses to fade.

9) BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater)

Linklater’s collaboration with actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke may have started as a one-off lark, but it has deepened over the 18 years since Before Sunrise into a unique cinematic experiment, akin to an Up-style examination of the trajectory of a (fictional) couple moving from infatuation through to a relationship weighted with history, with frustration, love and pain. Midnight cuts closer to the bone than either of the previous two films, perhaps because of that weight, but it’s also because of the fearlessness of its players and the natural ease and unwavering gaze of its director, which leaves enough room for unexpected grace as well as anguish. Is it too much to hope that the experiment would continue at least through the dawn?

8-8.5) PAIN & GAIN (Michael Bay)

             THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese)

Two go-for-broke, distinctively American satires of greed, disillusionment and entitlement—both, not insignificantly, ripped from chronicles of real-life repellent behavior-- that must have Billy Wilder cackling from whatever circle of hell he’s keeping entertained these days. Both Bay’s brutally funny crime farce and Scorsese’s dive into the decadence of Wall Street corruption are savvy circuses of misguided, contemptuous self-justification. In Pain & Gain, the victims are, necessarily, right there on screen (and Tony Shaloub gloriously so). The Wolf of Wall Street, on the other hand, deals in lingering despair and angry, understated sympathy in its implicit and explicit consideration of the victims of Jordan Belfort's rapacious greed. But both also, crucially, hold the mirror up to their own audiences in taking measure of just how the philosophy of acquisition has become a guiding, bedrock belief for a society where attainment of wealth and fame has usurped achievement as its own reward. These are riotous, insanely pleasurable movies that bite back.

(In addition to Richard Brody’s essay linked above, see also his follow-up piece, "The Lasting Power of The Wolf of Wall Street"

7) BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (Abdellatif Kechiche)

Anchored by devastating, electric performances from Lea Seydoux and, especially, Adele Exarchopolous, this gorgeous, incisively observed, fearless journey through romantic awakening and the meaning of desire, especially when it vanishes from half the equation, is enough to singlehandedly restore faith in the movies’ ability to explore and communicate the glory and agony of obsessive love. It’s a three-hour-long indulgence in pleasures of the kind that have virtually disappeared from American movies—that is, a serious examination of a relationship, in its blossom and in its fading, that also doesn’t shy away from the physicality of sex, of what makes sex fun, or any of the other aspects of coming together, staying together and saying good-bye that may leave an even greater, more meaningful impression.

6) 20 FEET FROM STARDOM (Morgan Neville)

This deeply enjoyable documentary about backup singers in the rock and soul era tells many stories, from that of Darlene Love, ostensibly the woman who focused the spotlight on the versatility of those singers who supported the lead vocalist (and whose own career as a solo act may have been sabotaged by producer Phil Spector), through the frustrations of Merry Clayton and Claudia Lennear, and on to the reluctance of the brilliant Lisa Fischer to take the spotlight as her own. Even as it illustrates the bitter truth that talent and passion and commitment do not guarantee stardom, and poses the question as to what exactly constitutes a “star,” the film revels in the warmth of these women, their persistence and, most appropriately, the transcendence of their astonishing voices. No movie this year gave me more near-Pentecostal pleasure than the footage of Merry Clayton stepping into a studio and listening to the isolated track of her raging vocal on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” her eyes darting with delight at the sound of the spectacular performance finally being set apart from everything surrounding it. In that moment you’d have to be deaf and/or insane not to think that Merry Clayton had finally traversed those 20 feet and reached the promised land.

5) ENOUGH SAID (Nicole Holofcener)

Another gem from the woman who wrote and directed Please Give and Friends with Money, a movie which takes its screwball sit-com premise and teases from it questions and observations which wouldn’t even cross the radar of most modern, crudely romantic comedies. Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) is a masseuse who starts dating Albert, (James Gandolfini), a man she meets at a party, only to find out, after connecting the dots herself, that he’s the ex-husband her client-friend Marianne (Catherine Keener) is constantly deriding. Exquisitely, sharply written and performed, without a hint of pandering to the audience, the movie keeps pace as both Eva and Albert juggle their lives as single parents of college-bound daughters, discovering how their personalities mesh in unexpected ways and moving toward a possible point of no return as Eva’s genuine attraction and connection with Albert becomes undermined by Marianne’s unwitting influence. Holofcener again proves herself a masterful, loose-limbed conductor of the sort of scaled-down, exquisitely astute and funny interpersonal story that once seemed Hollywood’s stock in trade but seems almost unapproachable by denizens of the current comedy sausage factory.

4) THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, Christine Cynn)

It’s possible to watch The Act of Killing minute by minute and never stop marveling at the psychological elasticity and awareness it must have taken for Oppenheimer and company to persuade the film’s subjects to participate in its making, or to keep their perspective as filmmakers from slipping away and ceding to the madness. This is surely a most unique achievement in the documentation of evil—Oppenheimer invites several Indonesian paramilitary thugs, who enacted the genocide of thousands of Communists in the mid ‘60s and who remain openly proud of their achievements (they fear no reprisals, because the government that backed their slaughter is still in power), to re-enact the circumstances of the killings on film, informed by their own Hollywood-fueled fantasies and often with the conscripted “help” of the surviving relatives of their victims. In indulging these reenactments, Oppenheimer’s film reaches hallucinatory heights of disbelief—there’s a production number in which a bevy of beauties, overseen by an overweight killer done up like Divine, dances out of the mouth of a giant fish, and an agonizing sequence in which a man describes burying his stepfather, who died at the hands of the very men talking to him, and then plays (by force?) the role of that same stepfather in a reenactment of the murder. But the film is never more delirious than when considering the nightmares befalling Anwar Congo, one of the central murderers, who only wants to find a way “not to feel guilty,” to use fantasy as a way to perpetually elude the escalating reality his mind seems intent on imposing upon him. At one point Anwar even steps into the role of one of his own victims, wondering, upon review of his apparently Method-informed performance, if the people he killed felt anything like what he felt. From behind the camera Oppenheimer intones, “Those you tortured felt far worse.” It’s a remarkably, crucially understated response to horror, much like The Act of Killing itself.

Read also Joshua Oppenheimer’s own account of how The Act of Killing is forcing a confrontation within Indonesia with the reality of its own bloody past by clicking here.

3) INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

From the moment Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is heard singing the folk ballad “Hang Me, O Hang Me,” like a plaintive admission of defeat, or perhaps a taunt aimed at the fates, one begins to suspect the interior geography explored by the movie will be rife with regret, longing, imperious self-regard and a fair (or unfair?) helping of frustration. The movie is a bitter-pill character piece, hilarious and horrifying and incisive, often all at the same time, crafted with the chill of a bitter New York City winter, a study in insular narcissism cast in a time when the meaning of the folk movement lay precisely in the sort of reaching inward, for truth in expression, and outward, to affect individual lives and as a result the machinery of social change, that Llewyn Davis no longer seems interested in. We are, after all, inside Llewyn Davis, a place where music has lost its meaning as a social tool, as a means of reciprocal human connection, as anything other than the nearly abstract expression of pure talent and the desire to be recognized. That it failed to resonate more fully for audiences in this age of American Idol and instant, disposable fame says much more about audiences (and the vagaries of movie marketing) that it does about this latest wonder from the fertile, unforgiving, blackly comical minds of the Coens.

2) HER (Spike Jonze)

Spike Jonze’s wistful meditation on what romantic connection means in an age where every social interaction is mediated, informed or altered by technology. The movie takes place in an unspecified, cyberdeveloped future where the past still remains an unspoken influence, in a city that has an ethereal, almost extraterrestrial otherness but is actually a clever visual melding of present-day Los Angeles and Shanghai (Los Angelenos ought to be amusingly arrested and amazed by just how well the two places merge together). Despite these nods to futurism, the way the characters have become intertwined with machines of convenience that define the parameters of their lives can only be seen as very much The Way We Live Today. And fitting his own satirical romanticism, Jonze doesn’t see this as cause for alarm or ominous statements of impending doom, even as he conjures and refashions the usual human difficulties with sex and other entanglements. Instead, he’s conjured from this overtly designed world a melancholy take on newfangled romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a man still depressed and lingering over finalizing a divorce initiated a year earlier, and a sultry-voiced computer operating system who goes by the name of Samantha (Scarlet Johanssen). This strange coupling feeds richly into the movie’s central concern, the locus of its singular heartbreak-- how an already fluid society will adapt when the evolution of technological intelligence begins to outpace that of man’s. The heart of Her may be digital, but even as it betrays the fears and attractions of a world infused by and addicted to the siren call of social media and other invasive technological advances, its emotional range remains stubbornly analog, encompassing the recognizable warmth and unfulfilled longing of lovers from the past, like Rick and Ilsa fading into ones and zeroes on a virtual tarmac.

1)      THE GREAT BEAUTY (Paolo Sorrentino)

From its opening images, which recast the Rome of La Dolce Vita (1960) in the pulsating visual bombast of a happy 21^st-century apocalypse, Paolo Sorrentino’s glorious visual and sensual treat seems in conversation not only with Federico Fellini’s seminal dissection of cultural decadence, but also with the director’s haunting Roma, released 12 years later in 1972. In fact, as Michael Atkinson recognized in his review for The Village Voice, Sorrentino engages with the whole movement of a 1960s cinema, “when such filmmaking hubris was thick on the ground,” and in the process whets our appetite for returning to older, still vital works and imagining that Sorrentino might be one to take us to new heights within the familiar framework of past triumphs. The year’s best performance by an male actor was given by Toni Servillo as Jep Gambardelli, a writer of possibly inflated literary standing who cruises through his 65^th birthday holding court over a sweaty bacchanalia of self-regard and satirically barbed takedowns of imperious Roman pretense and privilege, all woven together with the faintest strains of melancholy flitting like imperceptible shadows across Jep’s welcoming, ever-satisfied countenance. Gore Vidal, in Fellini Roma, postulated that Rome was the perfect city from which to witness the end of the world, and Sorrentino presents both the city and the impending sense of doom held within it with astonishing confidence and bravado.  Jep functions as the perfect tour guide for the prelude to Armageddon, surrounded by indulgences of the spirit and the flesh, but forever remaining just off to the side, affected by the ghosts of past and current loves lost, contemplating possible futures which play like crashing waves on the ceiling of his imagination. The echoes of Fellini are inevitable, but Sorrentino, if he continues to drift down the river of resonant remembrance that characterizes this movie, straight through to its unhurried, mystical float down the Turin underneath the end credits, he could prove to be not only a worthy successor to Fellini’s florid mastery, but to the great promise for a resurgence in Italian cinema as well.

********************************************

THE BEST OF THE REST (“Close, Ward. Close.”)

11) BLACKFISH (Gabriela Cowperthwaite)

12) ALL IS LOST (J.C. Chandor)

13) ROOM 237 (Rodney Ascher)

14) GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuaron)

15) CURSE OF CHUCKY (Don Mancini)

16) THE WORLD'S END (Edgar Wright)

17) PRISONERS (Denis Villeneuve)

18) WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS (Alex Gibney)

19) UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth)

20) FRUITVALE STATION (Ryan Coogler)

 

THE PRE-END-OF-YEAR TOP 10 (logged 12/31/2013)

        1) BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

             2) ALL IS LOST 
          3) BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
          4) THE EAST (Zal Batmanglij)
          5) GRAVITY
         6) BEFORE MIDNIGHT
         7) THE WORLD'S END
         8) MUD (Jeff Nichols)  
         9) DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (Jean-Marc Vallee)
         10) PAIN & GAIN

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL (in descending order)

BLUE JASMINE (Woody Allen)

SPRING BREAKERS (Harmony Korine)

CARRIE (Kimberly Peirce)

THE HOST (Andrew Niccol)

LONE SURVIVOR (Peter Berg)

BENEATH (Larry Fessenden)

THE CONJURING (James Wan)

MAN OF STEEL (Zack Snyder)

ONLY GOD FORGIVES (Nicolas Winding Refn)

PASSION (Brian De Palma)

BEST ACTOR

Toni Servillo The Great Beauty

Leonardo Di Caprio The Wolf of Wall Street

Robert Redford All is Lost

Oscar Isaac Inside Llewyn Davis

Jack Plotnick Wrong

BEST ACTRESS

Adele Exarchopolous Blue is the Warmest Color

Sandra Bullock Gravity

Jennifer Lawrence The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss Enough Said

Fiona Dourif  Curse of Chucky

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Jennifer Lawrence American Hustle

Lupita Nyong’o 12 Years a Slave

Margot Robbie The Wolf of Wall Street

Scarlet Johanssen Her

Brie Larson Don Jon

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Nick Frost The World’s End

Tony Shaloub Pain & Gain

John Goodman Inside Llewyn Davis

Nathan Fillion Much Ado About Nothing

David Oyelowo Lee Daniels’ The Butler

BEST SCREENPLAY

The Great Beauty

Inside Llewyn Davis

Her

The Wolf of Wall Street

Before Midnight

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Great Beauty

Inside Llewyn Davis

Her

Prisoners

Antiviral

THE YEAR IN CLASSICS AND OTHERS I SAW FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS YEAR

Movies seen projected are indicated in red.

AN ACT OF MURDER (1948) *** 
THE AMAZING DR. CLITTERHOUSE (1938) ***
ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS (1969) **½
BANJO ON MY KNEE (1936) ***

BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE (1959) **

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933) ****

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (1962) **

THE BRIDE WALKS OUT (1936) ***

BRUTE FORCE (1947) **½

BUCK PRIVATES COME HOME (1947) ***

BURKE AND HARE (2011) **

BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962) ***

CARAVANS (1979) **

THE CHALK GARDEN (1964) ***

CHRISTMAS EVE (1947) **½

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944) ***

CLAIRE DOLAN (2000) ***

DEAD RINGER (1964) **½

DEATH ON THE DIAMOND (1934) ***

THE DEVIL BAT (1940) ***

DOWN THREE DARK STREETS (1954) ***

THE FARMER TAKES A WIFE (1935) **½

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (2004) *½

GAMBLING LADY (1934) **½

GOD'S CARTOONIST: THE COMIC CRUSADE OF JACK CHICK (2008) ***

HELL DRIVERS (1957) ***

HIDEOUT (1949) **½

HIS BROTHER'S WIFE (1936) ***

HONDO (1953) ***½

HORROR HOTEL (a.k.a. CITY OF THE DEAD) (1960) ***

I AM SUZANNE! (1933) ***½

I SEE A DARK STRANGER (1946) **½

IF YOU COULD ONLY COOK (1935) ***

ILLICIT (1931) ***

IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY (1947) ****

I'VE GOT YOUR NUMBER (1934) ***½

JADE (1995) *½

LADIES' DAY (1943) **½

LADY OF BURLESQUE (1943) **½

LASSIE COME HOME (1943) ***½

LAST SUMMER (1969) **½

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING (1955) **½

LURED (1947) ***

MACABRE (1958) **½

THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE (LA MACCHINA AMMAZZACATTIVI) (1952) ***½

MANIAC (1963) **½

MANIAC COP 2 (1990) **

MANIAC COP 3: BADGE OF SILENCE (1993) (BOMB)

THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR (1943) **½

NINOTCHKA (1939) ***

PAISAN (1946) ****

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969) ***½

THE PROUD ONES (1956) **½

RAW DEAL (1948) ***

THE RAWHIDE YEARS (1955) **½

RED ANGEL (1966) ***

SAFE IN HELL (1931) ***

THE SCAR (a.k.a. THE MAN WHO MURDERED HIMSELF a.k.a. HOLLOW TRIUMPH) (1948) ***

SCARECROW (1973) ***½

SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964) ***½

SNUFF (1976) (BOMB)

SPIDER BABY (1964) **

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1969) ***½

STAKEOUT ON DOPE STREET (1958) ***

THE SWIMMER (1968) ***½

THE WAYWARD BUS (1957) **

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940) ***½

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) ***½

THIEVES' HIGHWAY (1949) ***½

THINGS TO COME (1936) **½

TORMENTED (1960) **

VICE RAID (1960) **½

VIGIL IN THE NIGHT (1940) ***

VOYAGE TO ITALY (1954) ***½

WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971) ***

THE WASP WOMAN (1959) **

CELEBRITIES I’LL MISS THE MOST WHO DIED IN 2013

DEADLIEST EXPERIENCES

Pacific Rim, Blue Jasmine

BIGGEST SURPRISES  

Pain & Gain, The Wolf of Wall Street, Wrong, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURING ME

Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-in

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS

Passion, Pacific Rim, American Hustle, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

ACADEMY OF THE UNDERRATED

Dark Skies

MOST EMBARRASSING MOVIES OF THE YEAR

Spring Breakers, Passion

BEST MOVIE OF 2013 (EMMA):

Fast & Furious 6

BEST MOVIE OF 2013 (NONIE):

Frozen

OSCAR PICKS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

If any of the following happens tomorrow night, you’d best get right with the Lord…

Best Picture: Philomena

Best Actor: Christian Bale

Best Actress: Meryl Streep

Best Supporting Actor: Bradley Cooper

Best Supporting Actress: Julia Roberts

Best Director: Alexander Payne

Best Original Screenplay: Nebraska

Best Adapted Screenplay: Philomena

Best Animated Feature: The Croods

Best Cinematography: Inside Llewyn Davis

Best Costume Design: The Invisible Woman

Best Editing: American Hustle

Best Makeup/Hairstyling: The Lone Ranger

Best Original Music Score: Saving Mr. Banks

Best Original Song: Her

Best Production Design: American Hustle

Best Sound Editing:  Lone Survivor

Best Sound Mixing: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Best Visual Effects: The Lone Ranger

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